At Harvard, A New Curriculum Advances
Derek Bok wasn't kidding when he said that he had no intention of being a placeholder for a year; yesterday,
Harvard's Fask Force on General Education unveiled a proposal for a revised curriculum that already seems to have impressed Harvard faculty, as well as some outsiders—though many have yet to have read it.
In two articles, the Crimson emphasizes that the most distinctive element of the new plan is its requirement that all Harvard students study religion and U.S. history. The requirement regarding the study of religion,
a Crimson news analysis argues, is "the most vulnerable" element of the plan.
In the Wall Street Journal, Zach Seward also seems to think that the "Reason and Faith" requirement is the new plan's most distinctive element.
Beyond that, the clear emphasis of the new proposal, from what I can tell, seems to be to link what students study to the world of today.
To quote the Crimson:
Under the new recommendations, students would be required to complete one half-course in each of seven areas—“Cultural Traditions and Cultural Change,” “The Ethical Life,” “The United States,” “Societies of the World,” “Reason and Faith,” “Life Sciences,” and “Physical Sciences.”
...
These fields conform to the four goals of general education set out by the report: teaching global citizenship, the ability to adapt to change, and an understanding of the ethical dimensions of life, as well as making students aware that they are both products and participants of cultural traditions.
Interestingly, the new required courses are explicitly intended to be survey courses, rather than in-depth looks at a particular event or phenomenon or work of art. (Somehow I think that one of the courses I used to teach in, on the social history of tuberculosis, would no longer satisfy a core requirement. And that's probably as it should be.)
The Crimson also points out that the new plan is an implicit concession to the fact that the vast majority of students have no intention of entering academia, and therefore care less about "modes of inquiry," a central emphasis of the current Core curriculum. Instead, this new plan wants to teach students a body of knowledge that they can use in the outside world.
A few thoughts.
Boy, does this plan represent the spirit of the age. The Core reflected the '60s and '70s sense that, with academia opening up so much to new inquiry and new disciplines, and the old disciplines under attack, it was virtually impossible to define a body of knowledge to be transmitted that could achieve any kind of viable consensus—and that just the attempt to do so would be divisive and counter-productive.
But students today don't want to sit around and think deep thoughts; they want knowledge to be a practical tool, a roadmap for life (and jobs in consulting) beyond Harvard.
The ethical reasoning requirement, if I recall correctly, would not have been part of a new curriculum under Larry Summers. It is, however, important to Derek Bok, who pushed for its inclusion in the Core thirty years ago. Nice to see its return.
This plan is also a huge victory for Harry Lewis, who has pushed for a coherent vision of general education for years now. His book is footnoted in the new proposal. Even preceding that, back in 2002, he gave a Morning Prayers talk on Harvard in a post-9/11 world in which he asked, "How will the Harvard faculty balance the reality that the U.S. is one nation among many in an ever smaller and more inerconnected world, with a recognition that the particular 'free society' in which Harvard exists is founded on ideals which Americans continue to be proud to defend and preserve?"
The new proposal seems practically intended to answer that question.
I haven't read the report, but I have one concern: To me, elements of it seem almost too practical. The "Cultural Traditions" requirement, for example, would mandate that "students would study how art throughout history impacts society today." (I will admit that I'm automatically skeptical of something that uses "impact" as a verb.) Meanwhile, "Reason and Faith" doesn't just study religion, it "explores the interaction between religious and secular institutions." (I'm quoting the Crimson here.)
In other words, we need to study religion not because it's important in its own right, but because it affects the world we secular Harvardians live in.
As
Alison Simmons, committee co-chair, tells AP education reporter Justin Pope, "As academics in a university we don't have to confront religion if we're not religious, but in the world, they will have to."
Confront?
I'm generally supportive of the idea that the study of any field should be connected to the present, because it's obviously true: everything that happened in the past has helped shape the present. But I can imagine this emphasis on the urgent becoming tortured and a bit silly....
Still, this is to be discussed. The big picture here is more important. This task force began meeting in June 2006 with essentially a clean slate. Four months later, it has produced a report that is worthy of serious consideration, something that didn't happen under five years of Larry Summers.
Meantime, I haven't seen a single mention of Derek Bok's name in any of the writing about the report...and yet, there's no question that he and interim FAS dean Jeremy Knowles can take credit here. Was there ever an article about the previous reviews which did not mention Summers?
(One wonders what Summers' supporters such as Marty Peretz, who would probably approve of this plan, will have to say about it, and whether they will acknowledge that Bok shepherded it into life?)
I could say something snarky here, but I won't; instead, I'd suggest only that this contrast would be an interesting thing for someone at the Kennedy School to study. How could one leader accomplish in four months what another could not in five years?
